Those people who care about "resentment" are not the people buying FPS, Action, and Sports games en masse. If anything, those people fucking hate those games. Seriously, Sports Games were the bastion of "normal" people even back when gaming was for "no-life losers." They were mocked ruthlessly by "real gamers," the type of person you are describing. Said people are a part of the market, but not one worth bothering marketing to except to keep them as quiet as possible so they don't get riled up and start a shit-storm. You may have had a point back before 2000 when the core games would have likely been Arena Shooters and RTS players and the market was targeting them (because they were the only people buying PC games). That shit is dead and gone. Has been for 15 years.Stas Bush wrote:But the core of my argument wasn't about their appearance; it was that their moral system is different due to the resentment. They can get laid, and they do it (the frequency and quality can be disputed, but still). That's not the point.
Kids who grew up playing with Transformer toys are not the people who turned "explosions and robots: the movie" into a billion dollar blockbuster. They watched the movie, bitched about it, then probably kept bitching about it. Those people do not matter other than posting mean things on the Internet about how Megan Fox is a skank and shouldn't have been in the movie. They are a drop in the bucket profit-wise.
This would mean something if the market was still pandering to the same group of guys. The whole point of a lot of games currently is to get money, try not to piss off the majority of your players, make new N+1 game, and make more money. Gaming, by and large, is now more profitable specifically because of people who view it as a diversion, rather than a way of life.What is the point, however, is that the 'achievements' of these people are not considered achievements at all by the society - this leads to resentment. And they are locked in it, because for them being able to get X frags or rank somewhere on a leaderboard actually is an achievement, and be damned all those that try to somehow 'invade', 'belittle', 'spoil' or 'ruin' their games.
No group of gamers has that status unless it's taken in a professional capacity. I've talked about this before, but most entertainment (especially interactive entertainment) is in this vein. Gaming is nothing special in this regard.But no group considers core gamers as life-achievers, as people of high social status except themselves in their enclosed fantasy world.
There's no difference between some kid bragging about 360noscoping some noob in COD than some other guy bragging about how X football team he supports beat Y football he does not support and how his choice makes him better than everyone else. It's human nature to say "my choices, no matter how trivial, make me better than you because they are my choices." To think that gaming is somehow special in this regard doesn't move me.
Video games may not have the coverage movies and sports do (and may never due to the interactive nature), but that doesn't change the fact that normal people (for lack of a better term) are firmly in charge of the industry. So trying to pawn off responsibility for the shitpile it's become onto so-called "hardcore gamers" doesn't pan.
That is why I said that, but I forgot to mention sports fans. Thanks for reminding. And no, actually, some people (maybe I can call them better people, dunno) manage to channel the resentment into activities that matter in real life: political movements, community policing et cetera.
